Jezirah or Jetzirah, Book Of

The Hebrew spelling is tnssb NDD, meaning, Book of the Creation. A Cabalistic work, which is claimed by the Cabalists as their first and oldest code of doctrines although it has no real affinity with the tenets of t he Cabala. The authorship of it is attributed to the Patriarch Abraham; but the actual date of its first appearance is supposed to be about the ninth century Steinschneider says that it opens the literature of the Secret Doctrine. Its fundamental idea is, that in the ten digits and the twenty letters of the Hebrew alphabet we are to find the origin of all things. Landauer, a German Hebraist, thinks that the author of the Jetzirah borrowed his doctrine of numbers from the School of Pythagoras, which is very probable. The old Freemasons, it is probable, derived some of their mystical ideas of sacred numbers from this work.